Thomas Poell

Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr as platforms of alternative journalism: The social media account of the 2010 Toronto G20 protests:

This article examines the appropriation of social media as platforms of alternative journalism by the protestors of the 2010 G20 summit in Toronto, Canada. The Toronto Community Mobilization Network, the network that coordinated the protests, urged participants to broadcast news using Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr. This particular use of social media is studied in the light of the history and theory of alternative journalism. Analyzing a set of 11,556 tweets, 222 videos, and 3,338 photos, the article assesses user participation in social media protest reporting, as well as the resulting protest accounts. The findings suggest that social media did not facilitate the crowd-sourcing of alternative reporting, except to some extent for Twitter. As with many previous alternative journalistic efforts, reporting was dominated by a relatively small number of users. In turn, the resulting account itself had a strong event-oriented focus, mirroring often-criticized mainstream protest reporting practices.

Social media and the transformation of activist communication: exploring the social media ecology of the 2010 Toronto G20 protests

How does the massive use of social media in contemporary protests affect the character of activist communication? Moving away from the conceptualization of social media as tools, this research explores how activist social media communication is entangled with and shaped by heterogeneous techno-cultural and political economic relations. This exploration is pursued through a case study on the social media reporting efforts of the Toronto Community Mobilization Network, which coordinated and facilitated the protests against the 2010 Toronto G-20 summit. The network urged activists to report about the protests on Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr, tagging their contributions #g20report. In addition, it set up a Facebook group and used a blog. The investigation, first, traces the hyperlink network in which the protest communication was embedded. The hyperlink analysis provides a window on the online ecology in which this communication unfolded. In addition, the examination interrogates how the particular technological architectures, related user practices, and business models of the various social platforms steered communication. This investigation shows that the use of social media brings about an acceleration of activist communication, and greatly enhances its visual character. Moreover, as activists massively embrace corporate social media, they increasingly lose control over the data they collective produce, as well as over the very architectures of the spaces through which they communicate.

Will the Real Weibo Please Stand Up? Chinese Online Contention and Actor-Network Theory

Social media platforms have become key participants in Chinese political contention. Global media eagerly report on cases involving social media, often celebrating them as signs of political change. This article analyzes the involvement of Sina Weibo in two instances of political contention: one concerns the Huili picture scandal of June 2011, and the other a controversy around the popular rally racer and novelist Han Han that started in December 2011. Drawing inspiration from actor-network theory (ANT), we show how Sina Weibos particular technological features, the related user cultures, and the platforms systematic self-censorship practices, in addition to the occasional government interventions, mutually articulate each other. By tracing how technological features and emerging practices become entangled, we gain insight into how new publics are constituted and how symbolic reconfigurations unfold.

Understanding the promises and premises of online health platforms

This article investigates the claims and complexities involved in the platform-based economics of health and fitness apps. We examine a double-edged logic inscribed in these platforms, promising to offer personal solutions to medical problems while also contributing to the public good. On the one hand, online platforms serve as personalized data-driven services to their customers. On the other hand, they allegedly serve public interests, such as medical research or health education. In doing so, many apps employ a diffuse discourse, hinging on terms like “sharing,” “open,” and “reuse” when they talk about data extraction and distribution. The analytical approach we adopt in this article is situated at the nexus of science and technology studies, political economy, and the sociology of health and illness. The analysis concentrates on two aspects: datafication (the use and reuse of data) and commodification (a platform’s deployment of governance and business models). We apply these analytical categories to three specific platforms: 23andMe, PatientsLikeMe, and Parkinson mPower. The last section will connect these individual examples to the wider implications of health apps’ data flows, governance policies, and business models. Regulatory bodies commonly focus on the (medical) safety and security of apps, but pay scarce attention to health apps’ techno-economic governance. Who owns user-generated health data and who gets to benefit? We argue that it is important to reflect on the societal implications of health data markets. Governments have the duty to provide conceptual clarity in the grand narrative of transforming health care and health research.

Making Public Television Social? Public Service Broadcasting and the Challenges of Social Media

This article investigates how the rise of social media affects European public service broadcasting (PSB), particularly in the United Kingdom and The Netherlands. We explore the encounter of “social” and “public” on three levels: the level of institution, professional practice, and content. After investigating these three levels, we address the more general question of how public broadcasters are coping with the challenges of social media. How can public television profit from the abilities of social media to engage new young audiences (and makers) without compromising public values? And will PSB be able to extend the creation of public value outside its designated space to social media at large? While the boundaries between public and corporate online space are becoming progressively porous, the meaning of “publicness” is contested and reshaped on the various levels of European public broadcasting.

Protest leadership in the age of social media

ABSTRACT This article challenges the idea that social media protest mobilization and communication are primarily propelled by the self-motivated sharing of ideas, plans, images, and resources. It shows that leadership plays a vital role in steering popular contention on key social platforms. This argument is developed through a detailed case study on the interaction between the administrators and users of the Kullena Khaled Said Facebook page, the most popular online platform during the Egyptian revolution of early 2011. The analysis specifically focuses on the period from 1 January until 15 February 2011. It draws from 1629 admin posts and 1,465,696 user comments, extracted via a customized version of Netvizz. For each day during this period, the three most engaged with posts, as well as the 10 most engaged with comments, have been translated and coded, making it possible to systematically examine how the administrators tried to shape the communication on the page, and how users responded to these efforts. This analysis is pursued from a sociotechnical perspective. It traces how the exchanges on the page are simultaneously shaped by the admins’ marketing strategies and the technological architecture of the Facebook page. On the basis of this exploration, we argue that the page administrators should be understood as ‘connective leaders’. Rather than directing protest activity through formal organizations and collective identity frames, as social movement leaders have traditionally done, connective leaders invite and steer user participation by employing sophisticated marketing strategies to connect users in online communication streams and networks.

Data and agency

This introduction to the special issue on data and agency argues that datafication should not only be understood as the process of collecting and analysing data about Internet users, but also as feeding such data back to users, enabling them to orient themselves in the world. It is important that debates about data power recognise that data is also generated, collected and analysed by alternative actors, enhancing rather than undermining the agency of the public. Developing this argument, we first make clear why and how the question of agency should be central to our engagement with data. Subsequently, we discuss how this question has been operationalized in the five contributions to this special issue, which empirically open up the study of alternative forms of datafication. Building on these contributions, we conclude that as data acquire new power, it is vital to explore the space for citizen agency in relation to data structures and to examine the practices of data work, as well as the people involved in these practices.

Connecting Activists and Journalists: Twitter communication in the aftermath of the 2012 Delhi rape

This article examines how feminist activists, womens organizations, and journalists in India connected with each other through Twitter following the gang rape incident in New Delhi in December 2012. First, the investigation draws on a set of +15 million tweets specifically focused on rape and gang rape. These tweets, which appeared between 16 January 2013 and 16 January 2014, were collected and analysed with the DMI Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolset. Second, to gain further insight into how Twitter enables and shapes civil society connections, the article builds on 15 semi-structured interviews with Indian feminist activists and journalists, who actively participated in Twitter communication on the gang rape incident. The analysis of the Twitter and interview data reveals how the platform allows these actors to make ad hoc connections around particular protest issues and events. These connections alter both activist and journalist practices, and ultimately facilitate the current transformation of public discourse on gender violence. Twitter helps to keep this issue consistently on the front burner. In this sense, a significant shift from the past has occurred, when media coverage typically died out after an incident ceased to be news. Yet, our study also suggests that connectivity is tempered by Twitters limited Indian user base, and users’ focus on the “crime of the day.”

Twitter as a Multilingual Space: The Articulation of the Tunisian Revolution Through #Sidibouzid

This article explores how the Tunisian revolution was articulated on Twitter; it does so through a detailed analysis of a sample of more than 100,000 tweets posted between 18 December 2010 and 15 January 2011 with the hashtag #sidibouzid. In addition to this analysis nine active #sidibouzid users were interviewed. This examination shows that #sidibouzid constituted a global communication space in which different public audiences were strategically addressed through a variety of languages. How key users employed the different languages and the platform itself depended very much on their particular position in the Arab diaspora network.

Data critique and analytical opportunities for very large Facebook Pages: Lessons learned from exploring “We are all Khaled Said”

This paper discusses the empirical, Application Programming Interface (API)-based analysis of very large Facebook Pages. Looking in detail at the technical characteristics, conventions, and peculiarities of Facebook’s architecture and data interface, we argue that such technical fieldwork is essential to data-driven research, both as a crucial form of data critique and as a way to identify analytical opportunities. Using the “We are all Khaled Said” Facebook Page, which hosted the activities of nearly 1.9 million users during the Egyptian Revolution and beyond, as empirical example, we show how Facebook’s API raises important questions about data detail, completeness, consistency over time, and architectural complexity. We then outline an exploratory approach and a number of analytical techniques that take the API and its idiosyncrasies as a starting point for the concrete investigation of a large dataset. Our goal is to close the gap between Big Data research and research about Big Data by showing that the critical investigation of technicity is essential for empirical research and that attention to the particularities of empirical work can provide a deeper understanding of the various issues Big Data research is entangled with.